A friend accidentally did mkfs.vfat on my 1Tb ext. hard drive…It’s now showing as 400 GB free where it was 10 GB previously and the remaining data is being shown as weird symbols and empty folders and yet it occupies more than 500GB…Any way to recover the data completely? Thanks in advance:(
Hello soldier101,
It might sound strange, but I recommend that you backup your harddrive with dd first.
Work on that backup and not on the harddisk!
In case any recovery program/command fails and changes your harddrive then you still have your harddisk.
Make several backups so you can try different techniques.
I don’t have much experience with recovering lost data but you could try TestDisk.
TestDisk - CGSecurity
You’re lucky that mkfs.vfat doesn’t zero out your harddisk, but writes a blank vfat.
Best of luck!